Standard makes network virtualization a trill

No, that's not a typo. TRILL is a pending IETF standard that stands for Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links that is a solution for the shortest-path frame routing in multi-hop standard Ethernet networks. It is a critical piece of the puzzle for building large virtual networks in the datacenter.

At this point in time the TRILL working group is scheduled to evaluate the work they have dozen and either reposition the group or shut it down, if the proposed standard that has been submitted is accepted. Many vendors are basing their next generation switching hardware on the proposed standard; some like Cisco with their announcement of their FabricPath technology are claiming to have implemented a superset of the TRILL standard.

TRILL is proposed to have no impact on the network layer architecture. This means that all of the vendors promoting the move to a single layer network in the datacenter are still well within the TRILL guidelines. No changes to signaling or routing are permitted of the vendor adheres to the standard.  Defined in a single statement, the purpose of TRILL is to wean networks off the use of spanning-tree architectures and remove the potential blocking issues that such architectures have, especially in a virtual networking infrastructure.

This is an important step as we move to the fully virtualized datacenter. It will be important in the long-term success of virtualization of that the standard be adopted and supported, which will simplify the choices of technologies for the datacenter administrator and allow future growth for virtualization.